Walpole's record as a politician is a brief one, and if his influence upon the questions of his time was of any importance, it must have been exercised unobtrusively. During the period of the 'great Walpolean battle,' as Junius styled the struggle that culminated in the downfall of Lord Orford, he was a fairly regular attendant in the House of Commons; and, as we have seen, spoke in his father's behalf when the motion was made for an enquiry into his conduct. Nine years later, he moved the address, and a few years later still, delivered a speech upon the employment of Swiss Regiments in the Colonies. Finally he resigned his 'senatorial dignity,' quitting the scene with the valediction of those who depreciate what they no longer desire to retain. 'What could I see but sons and grandsons playing over the same knaveries, that I have seen their fathers and grandfathers act? Could I hear oratory beyond my Lord Chatham's? Will there ever be parts equal to Charles Townshend's? Will George Grenville cease to be the most tiresome of beings?'[206] In his earlier days he was a violent Whig,—at times almost a Republican' (to which latter phase of his opinions must be attributed the transformation of King Charles's death-warrant into 'Major Charta'); 'in his old and enfeebled age,' says Miss Berry, 'the horrors of the first French Revolution made him a Tory; while he always lamented, as one of the worst effects of its excesses, that they must necessarily retard to a distant period the progress and establishment of religious liberty.' He deplored the American War, and disapproved the Slave Trade; but, in sum, it is to be suspected that his main interest in politics, after his father's death, and apart from the preservation throughout an 'age of small factions' of his own uncertain sinecures, was the good and ill fortune of the handsome and amiable, but moderately eminent statesman, General Conway. It was for Conway that he took his most active steps in the direction of political intrigue; and perhaps his most important political utterance is the Counter Address to the Public on the late Dismission of a General Officer, which was prompted by Conway's deprivation of his command for voting in the opposition with himself in the debate upon the illegality of general warrants. Whether he would have taken office if it had been offered to him, may be a question; but his attitude, as disclosed by his letters, is a rather hesitating nolo episcopari. The most interesting result of his connection with public affairs is the series of sketches of political men dispersed through his correspondence, and through the posthumous Memoirs published by Lord Holland and Sir Denis Le Marchant. Making every allowance for his prejudices and partisanship (and of neither can Walpole be acquitted), it is impossible not to regard these latter as highly important contributions to historical literature. Even Mr. Croker admits that they contain 'a considerable portion of voluntary or involuntary truth;' and such an admission, when extorted from Lord Beaconsfield's 'Rigby,' of whom no one can justly say that he was ignorant of the politics of Walpole's day, has all the weight which attaches to a testimonial from the enemy.[207]
This mention of the Memoirs naturally leads us to that final consideration, the position of Walpole as an author. Most of the productions which fill the five bulky volumes given to the world in 1798 by Miss Berry's pious care have been referred to in the course of the foregoing pages, and it is not necessary to recapitulate them here. The place which they occupy in English literature was never a large one, and it has grown smaller with lapse of time. Walpole, in truth, never took letters with sufficient seriousness. He was willing enough to obtain repute, but upon condition that he should be allowed to despise his calling and laugh at 'thoroughness.' If masterpieces could have been dashed off at a hand-gallop; if antiquarian studies could have been made of permanent value by the exercise of mere elegant facility; if a dramatic reputation could have been secured by the simple accumulation of horrors upon Horror's head,—his might have been a great literary name. But it is not thus the severer Muses are cultivated; and Walpole's mood was too variable, his industry too intermittent, his fine-gentleman self-consciousness too inveterate, to admit of his producing anything that (as one of his critics has said) deserves a higher title than 'opuscula.' His essays in the World lead one to think that he might have made a more than respectable essayist, if he had not fallen upon days in which that form of writing was practically outworn; and it is manifest that he would have been an admirable writer of familiar poetry if he could have forgotten the fallacy (exposed by Johnson)[208] that easy verse is easy to write. Nevertheless, in the Gothic romance which was suggested by his Gothic castle—for, to speak paradoxically, Strawberry Hill is almost as much as Walpole the author of the Castle of Otranto—he managed to initiate a new form of fiction; and by decorating 'with gay strings the gatherings of Vertue' he preserved serviceably, in the Anecdotes of Painting, a mass of curious, if sometimes uncritical, information which, in other circumstances, must have been hopelessly lost. If anything else of his professed literary work is worthy of recollection, it must be a happy squib such as the Letter of Xo Ho, a fable such as The Entail, or an essay such as the pamphlet on Landscape Gardening, which even Croker allows to be 'a very elegant history and happy elucidation of that charming art.'[209]
But it is not by his professedly literary work that he has acquired the reputation which he retains and must continue to retain. It is as a letter-writer that he survives; and it is upon the vast correspondence, of which, even now, we seem scarcely to have reached the limits, that is based his surest claim volitare per ora virum. The qualities which are his defects in more serious productions become merits in his correspondence; or, rather, they cease to be defects. No one looks for prolonged effort in a gossipping epistle; a weighty reasoning is less important than a light hand; and variety pleases more surely than symmetry of structure. Among the little band of those who have distinguished themselves in this way, Walpole is in the foremost rank,—nay, if wit and brilliancy, without gravity or pathos, are to rank highest, he is first. It matters nothing whether he wrote easily or with difficulty; whether he did, or did not, make minutes of apt illustrations or descriptive incidents: the result is delightful. For diversity of interest and perpetual entertainment, for the constant surprises of an unique species of wit, for happy and unexpected turns of phrase, for graphic characterization and clever anecdote, for playfulness, pungency, irony, persiflage, there is nothing in English like his correspondence. And when one remembers that, in addition, this correspondence constitutes a sixty-years' social chronicle of a specially picturesque epoch by one of the most picturesque of picturesque chroniclers, there can be no need to bespeak any further suffrage for Horace Walpole's 'incomparable letters.'